


love don't leave me alone

by jdphoenix



Series: like howling at the moon [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, F/M, Grant Ward Isn't Hydra, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-23
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2019-02-19 02:55:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13114500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: For a team with a werewolf on the roster, the last night of the full moon is always the longest. This one was longer than most.





	love don't leave me alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SafelyCapricious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/gifts).



> A Christmas gift for the wonderful, amazing, stupendous, sweetest Mir ever! Love you, hon! I hope you like it!
> 
> The rest of you are probably wondering just how many biospec werewolf AUs I can write. More than this, lemme tell you.

The sun’s already set. The only light in the woods comes from a heavy duty flashlight dropped haphazardly back on the path. Its light breaks through the trees, creating stark shadows that bisect the fight happening not five feet from Jemma. Her heart hammers in her throat and that’s all that keeps a scream from breaking out when she catches sight of a fist hitting Ward’s face.

But Ward is a highly trained specialist, at the height of his strength tonight of all nights. Once the surprise of the attack passes, he manages to get his assailant— _her_ assailant—in a choke hold. She hears cuffs snap and sees he’s even managed to restrain Lowry’s hands behind his back.

“Do it,” Ward says. A high-pitched sound, something between a wheeze and a whine escapes Lowry as his chest is force upward in invitation.

The gun is heavy in Jemma’s grip.

“Do it!” Ward snarls, more of the wolf in him than she’s ever seen. The moon is coming.

Can she feel it? Is it only Ward’s prodding that sets the hairs on the back of her neck on end or is it some extra awareness, a new sense settling into her bones as the infection takes hold?

“Simmons! We don’t have time for this!”

She can’t seem to lift the gun. She orders her arm to move, but it won’t. The pressure is too much.

“If you don’t do it, I will,” Ward warns. Like the fairy tale, his eyes seem strangely large in his head. His mouth opens too wide, snapping teeth stealing what little courage she has. “ _Simmons!_ ” he roars, his usual frustrated tone turning to a howl as he lunges for her.

 

 

 

 

Jemma jerks awake. Skye’s head slips off her shoulder and to her lap. On her other side, Fitz mumbles something about spark plugs and rolls his shoulders to a more comfortable position against the glass exterior of the lab. But Jemma’s rather more concerned with Ward, who’s frozen between Lola and the van, one hand fisted in the overlarge jeans wrapped around his waist.

He’s filthy, covered in scrapes and cuts. He needs medical attention. She wiggles free of Fitz and Skye and the blankets someone draped over them in the night.

“You don’t have to-” Ward says softly. She cuts him off with a look and he follows her silently into the lab.

“Sit,” she says, tapping a stool on her way through to storage. There are clothes in the back—mostly standard issue sweats and t-shirts in case they pick up someone in need of a change—and the chance to get Ward a set gives Jemma time to shake off the last of her nightmare.

Ward would never hurt her. He never has and last night proved conclusively that he never will. The dream was just the stress of the day and the night and the- the-

Even in her own mind she can’t say the word. Tears pool in her eyes and the shirt she holds wrinkles in her grip. She breathes deep, bouncing her shoulders while she wills away the hysteria she can feel building. She’s fine.

She’s fine.

Back in the lab, Ward mutters a small thanks for the clothes and she turns her back on him to gather supplies, affording him plenty of time to change—and herself plenty of time to recover. Yet when she returns to him with a weak smile, he doesn’t reciprocate.

“Have you been up all night?”

She shrugs one shoulder and wets a cotton swab with some alcohol. He doesn’t flinch when she presses it to a nasty scrape on his arm.

“Why?”

There’s no answer for that. By the time she made it back to the Bus she’d been up for more than twenty-four hours, though it felt more like forty-eight with the stress of those last sixteen. Both Fitz and Skye, separately and together, tried to coax her to bed. And it’s not as though she didn’t know it made no difference. Ward wouldn’t be returning until morning, until after the moon set and he managed to get himself back from wherever his canine personality ended up after hours of doing whatever it is wolves do on their last night of freedom before a month of humanity.

She couldn’t go to bed though. Just like she couldn’t-

The world around her goes dim and her eyes slip shut. She was thinking it was like lifting the gun, knowing she had to and being unable to do it, only thing is she _did_ lift the gun. She aimed precisely the way Ward taught her during hurried lessons between leads on Lowry. And she fired. A central mass shot that lodged in the man’s chest cavity, emptying his lungs and slowing his heart.

And then another. He was as good as dead already, far as they were from medical care, but Ward insisted he needed to be dead _faster_ , before the full moon rose and all of this became pointless, and laid him on the ground so she could finish him.

She knelt beside his shaking body, pressed the barrel of the gun to his forehead. There had to be something to say, something that might let him understand why.

“I’m sorry.” At the moment she was shocked, thrown by the words in her head being spoken when she hadn’t found the voice to say them. But then her tear-filled eyes met Lowry’s. “S-sorry,” he said again. His words came out in gasping stops and starts, each like a blow to her chest. “I j-just didn’t want-t-to be al-lone.”

“Simmons,” Ward said gently. His hand wrapped around her shoulder, between her neck and the bandage. A reminder of why they were there.

She pulled the trigger.

She was capable of killing a man whose only crime was _loneliness_ and yet she has the gall to think there’s anything she can’t force herself to do.

“Hey.” Ward’s arms wrap around her and before she knows it she’s sobbing into his chest. For a man who Skye has frequently called a porcu-wolf, he is an excellent hugger, providing support where she’s weak and just the right amount of pressure in the hand that runs up and down her spine.

She clings to him like a child, thinking all the while that she killed a man. She’s a _murderer_. And yet she’s the one who spent all night being looked after by her friends, she’s the one being comforted now—and by _Ward_ of all people.

This is all Lowry wanted. Would it have been so hard to let him have it?

“You did what you had to do,” Ward says. 

She shakes her head against his collarbone, mindless of the dirt and grime clinging to his skin. “No. I could have-” She gasps as he yanks her away, his hands like iron around her arms.

“ _No_ ,” he says, the growl in his voice so reminiscent of her dream that she feels herself blanch. “You couldn’t have. You have _no idea_ what it’s like, Simmons.” He seems to realize he’s scaring her. His hands loosen, moving to fix her shirt and move her mussed hair from her face. “Lowry knew exactly how low lycanthropy can drag someone and he _infected you anyway_. And he knew your only way out would be to kill him before the moon rose. I know how much you’ve gotta be hurting right now, a first kill’s always rough, but don’t you dare be sorry for saving yourself from that.”

Perhaps if she’d been saving her own life she could be convinced of it, but infection doesn’t mean death and while Lowry was a mess of a human being, he wasn’t the rule when it comes to werewolves. SHIELD has excellent resources for those suffering from the condition, as Ward himself is evidence of.

He sighs heavily. His hands have returned to her arms and through her shirt, his thumb is sliding along the edge of the bandage covering her shoulder. The bite wound is still tender, proof positive that the infection’s been repelled. If it hadn’t, it would have healed overnight. 

“You remember what I said?” he asks. “That I would’ve killed him if you didn’t?”

She nods shakily. As a scare tactic it was excellent, spurring her to act in the moment when nothing else would.

“I meant it,” he says, his voice low and personal. “If we’d both transformed, I would’ve had to.”

“You didn’t kill me.” She was afraid he might, that with the smell of blood in the air his worse instincts would take over, but when she cowered against a tree, he only sniffed and licked her shoulder as if to reassure himself she really wasn’t going to follow his example and turn.

He smiles weakly. “Yeah, that’s kinda why. Wolves are animals, Simmons. And Lowry was lonely, enough he was willing to turn someone. If he transformed right next to a female, there was only gonna be one thing on his mind.”

She hadn’t thought of that. She should have though; for all the sympathy she feels for Lowry, it doesn’t change the fact that he violated her once already by biting her and infecting her with his disease.

A slow breath escapes her. She was defending herself.

She was right, that does make it easier to stomach. Not _easy_ , by any stretch, but easier.

“Thank you,” she says.

Ward shrugs and moves off to pull on the shirt she brought him. She’s barely seen to his injuries at all, but none of them are so vital as to need care. It seems he’s seen through her.

“Really,” she insists, resting a hand on his arm. “Thank you.”

He chuckles but there’s no humor in it. “If I’d been anyone else, you wouldn’t have been infected in the first place.”

Though that’s not strictly true—May and Coulson both failed to protect her, why should Ward be any different—she knows what he means. If he weren’t a werewolf, if he hadn’t been locked in the Cage for the second night of the full moon, he would have been there.

Impulsively, she rushes him, wrapping him in a hug from the side before he can do more than lift his arms out of her way.

“You saved me,” she says, her eyes shut, her forehead resting against his shoulder. “After you found out what happened, everything you did was to save me. You defied orders, went AWOL, put your own life at risk. And even after you transformed, you were still worried about me.” She remembers the way he nuzzled her injury, whining plaintively in a strange, animal sympathy.

She breathes deep, stepping back as a sense of longing overcomes her. Ward is staring at her as though he’s never seen her before. She smiles, struggling not to do the same.

“I can’t imagine anyone else doing all of that,” she says.

He seems to hesitate before nodding once and heading for the stairs, past Skye and Fitz, who are still sleeping peacefully. Jemma waits until he’s gone to press a hand to her heart.

She escaped one werewolf’s infection, but she’s somehow fallen into another’s. Somehow she doubts overcoming her newfound feelings for Ward will be anywhere as easy as last night was.

 


End file.
